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Friday, September 7, 2007      New: Take a Stand

Japanese beauties finally get face time on Shiseido advertising

It’s been a long time coming, but Japan’s No. 1 cosmetics marketer, Shiseido, has broken what had always appeared a peculiar custom to foreigners: it has taken the gaijin (foreign) faces out of its ads and substituted beautiful Japanese women.

Japanese actress Yu Aoi, left, and model Anne pose with Tsubaki, a new shampoo by Shiseido Co.. AP/Shiseido Co.
The campaign's slogan, which has rung true for a lot of Western men since Lt. Pinkerton, is: “Japanese women are beautiful."

Although there have been occasional attempts to “nativize” Japanese advertising, the most popular brands have always used foreign faces and endorsements even for the home market of many brands that have become household features around the world.

But with sophisticated young people all over the world discovering sushi, manga animation, computer games, kimono and other elements of Japanese culture, Shiseido's branding strategy appears to make sense.

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Japanese faces instead of foreign movie stars and other Western celebrities have racked up a big success for the introduction of Shiseido’s new shampoo, Tsubaki (pronounced tsooh-bah-key). The shampoo has already emerged as No. 1 in sales, according to Nikkei Shimbun, Japan's leading business newspaper, nosing out Unilever, P&G and its principal Japanese rival, Kao. It sold $155 million for 43 million bottles during its first year.

Shiseido pumped 5 billion Yen [$43 million] into a marketing campaign with a dramatic array of Japanese faces. TV, magazine and billboard ads featured models, actresses and a figure skater. It even hired a popular vocal group to sing the praises of Japanese women with a hit song.

Shiseido, which ventured into foreign markets in the late 1950s but hasn’t yet decided to take Tsubaki there yet, has a strong claim to being a Japanese innovator. Arinobu Fukuhara, former head pharmacist to the Japanese Imperial Navy, established the Shiseido Pharmacy in 1872 as part of the Meiji Era adoption of Western industrialization and cultural artifacts.

The new advertising innovation may reflect a whole social and political revolution that has swept Japan after a decade of economic stagnation following the collapse of the Bubble Economy in the early 1990s.

"Marketing is changing to reflect a changing lifestyle," Kaori Sasaki, who heads a communications consulting company, told the Associated Press. She noted a recent TV commercial for detergent that depicts a man doing the wash — something previously unthinkable in male-dominated Japan.

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